Summer 1995 NBER Workshop on "Patent Policy and Innovation"

On July 20th and 21st, 1995, a special workshop on patent policy and innovation was held as part of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Summer Institute. This day-and-a-half long session examined the recent evolution of the patent system in the U.S. and abroad, and the impact that these changes are having on the innovation process.

In 1982, a centralized appellate court for all patent-related Federal cases was established. While its stated purpose was to be a streamlined venue for treating patent cases in a systemized manner, the court has taken an aggressively "pro-patent" stance. The strengthening of patent law has not gone unnoticed by corporations. Over the past decade, patents awarded to U.S. firms have increased by 50%, even as industrial research spending has remained constant in inflation-adjusted dollars. The number of patent suits filed has increased three-fold. As a consequence, U.S. corporations appear to be spending nearly as much litigating intellectual property each year as the $4 billion they are spending on basic research. Given this shift in the institutional environment, we organized this workshop as a forum for the examination of patents, patent policy, and innovation.

This session featured papers that examine issues associated with intellectual property protection and innovation. Papers were heoretical or empirical in nature, and from an economic or a legal perspective,. In addition to academics, we invited a number of practitioners to the workshop, including U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officials, intellectual property attorneys, venture capitalists, and executives of high-technology firms. Several of these practitioners took part in two panel discussions. One panel focused on the current operation of the patent system; the other on a number of sweeping reforms to the system that have recently been proposed.

The session was sponsored by the Productivity and Output Measurement Group, which is directed by Zvi Griliches. For the past 15 years, the Group has had an ongoing research effort on productivity and technical change. Much of this work has focused on quantitative studies of the patenting behavior of firms. The Group sponsors weekly lunch seminars for researchers in the Boston area, tri-annual conferences that draw together an international group of academics, and occasional special conferences around particular themes.

This session was organized by Adam Jaffe, Jenny Lanjouw, Josh Lerner and Robert Merges.